New Technology File System and DHPOS

[Guest]

Hi Dale (and everyone)!

I really like your software. I have always been interested in POS systems, having worked in a few retail jobs. Of course, those available on the internet were inferior to yours, using silly graphics and their overall usefulness ridiculous.

My question is that with new technology, like Windows 2k, How does your program function with NTFS? Or does it? I currently have a FAT32 drive and have thought about converting it to NTFS, but haven't found many documents stating anything about operability of DOS programs on NTFS drives. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[Dale Harris]

Guest,

My specific answer to your question is that I have no idea. This is a question for Jon, Andrew, or any of the other operating system gurus that hang out around here.

However my general answer is much more helpful. It should not make any difference at all.

DOS application software (actually any application software) does not know or care how information is actually saved to the actual drive.

What my program does is that it says to the operating system, "Go open a file with this file name and save this data." When it wants the data back it says to the operating system, "Go open a file with this file name and read back the data." At no point does my software care or have any idea how the operating system stores or retrieves data from the disk.

Now lets see if Jon, Andrew, or someone else posts to tell me that I am totally wrong and stupid.

[RJ]

Dale is right. Does not matter if you are running your PC with a FAT16, FAT32 or NTFS file system. The software will work. I work on computers for a living mainly with POS software. Some DOS programs however will not run in XP regardless of the file system. Dale's software should work. I'm currently running Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 with a NTFS file system and have had not one problem.

[Andrew]

Software is completely and totally ignorant of the file system and the NTFS system provides many advantages over the older FAT systems.

It's the operating system which can cause the hassle - DHPOS runs fine on XP - I can vouch for that.

[Jonathan Simpson]

Right on target It does not matter what file system you use, under NT/2k/XP DOS is not really DOS. There are some minor stipulations...
You can't boot off a DOS floppy and read NTFS, so if your system dies you'll have a problem.